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Saturday, February 22, 2014

The Problem of Evil and Suffering

Ravi Zacharias International Ministries offers a daily devotional called A Slice of Infinity that you can receive in your email. On September 13, 2012, the following was published:

How Can I Believe in God and Pain?

"How do you expect me to believe in God," asked Woody
Allen, "when only last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of my
electric type-writer?"

For a while now, at least in the Western world, the existence of
any form of pain, suffering, or evil has been regarded as evidence for the
non-existence of God. If a good God existed, people reason, these things would
not. But they do and, therefore, God does not.

My job takes me around many different parts of the world in order
to answer people's questions about the Christian faith. I find it fascinating
that I have never been asked this question in India, a country that certainly
knows a lot more about suffering than many of us in the West. I find it even
more intriguing that Christians who write books in situations where they have
known unspeakable torment because of the gospel do not normally raise this as
an issue for themselves either. Why?

There are so many ways in which questions concerning pain can be
raised. It can be raised because of personal loss and suffering or because of a
personal interest in the issue of theodicy, to name but two. However,
regardless of the way the question is raised, it normally comes down to a moral
complaint against God. "How could you allow this to happen?" The
complaint is against God's moral character. "Can I really trust God if I
see this happen?" But if you are sure that you can trust God, regardless
of the pain you find yourself in, there is no temptation to turn you away, as
you realize God is the only one who can help.

Firstly, let's deal with the argument against God's existence.
Ravi Zacharias has dealt with this thoroughly in his book Can Man Live
Without God. If you argue from the existence of evil to the non-existence
of God, you are assuming the existence of an absolute moral law in order for
your argument to work. But if there is such a law this would also mean that
there is such a God, since God is the only one who could give us such a law.
And if there is such a God to give us this law, then the argument itself is
flawed, since you have had to assume the existence of God in order to argue
that God doesn't exist. It is an attempt to invoke the existence of an absolute
moral law without invoking the existence of an absolute moral law giver, and it
cannot be done.

Secondly, we must also ask the question: What would it take to
create a loving world void of evil? A world in which love is capable of
meaningful expression and experience would also imply a world in which there is
choice. If someone tells you that they love you, those words mean something
because they are freely given. If you learned that someone had told you they
loved you but that they had been forced to say it, their words would not mean
very much. Thus, if we want to speak of a loving world, we must also speak of a
world in which choices are exercised. And in such a world, there is also the
possibility of choosing a course of action that is not loving, i.e.
evil.

While these observations are helpful in getting at the heart
of contradictions often behind the questions of God and
suffering, I do not think they get at the heart of the questions as people most
commonly ask, namely: Can I trust God even when faced with great evil?
Is God morally trustworthy? Can I trust God even if I don't understand what is
happening?

These are profound questions, and whole books could be written
about them. But I will offer one more thought. Maybe the reason we question
God's moral character when bad things happen is that we live our lives largely
independent from God on a daily basis. In other words, we struggle to trust God
in times of trouble because we do not really trust God when things are going
well. Maybe we struggle with suffering so much in the West because we are so comfortable most
of the time that we feel we don't need God. We do not rely on God on a daily
basis, and so we do not really know God. When suffering comes along, therefore,
it is not so much that it takes us away from God, but that it reveals to us
that we have not really been close to God in the first place.

As I said earlier, I have never been asked questions about God and
suffering when I am travelling in countries riddled with the realities of it.
In fact, when I visit churches in parts of the world where they are faced daily
with horrific affliction, I normally leave inspired. They trust God in
everything, even when things are going well. When times are hard, they cling to
God because they have already learned to trust. They have learned that God does
not change, even when our circumstances have.

Michael Ramsden is European director of Ravi Zacharias
International Ministries in the United Kingdom.

A Slice of Infinity is “Our gift and invitation to you, that you
might further examine your beliefs, your culture, and the unique message of
Jesus Christ.”